


nothing here but the mess

by lorata



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Bodhi Rook Needs a Hug, Coping, Dissociation, Exhaustion, Gen, Identity Issues, Memory Related, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2018-12-21 09:43:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11941470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorata/pseuds/lorata
Summary: Rolling along, I'm in a strange state of mindIt's a strange old state of mindMemories, they mess with my mindChoose what to be, take a sideBodhi is still trying to put the pieces of himself back together after Bor Gullet tore through his mind and left him ragged and bleeding out into the edges of his consciousness. Funny thing is, he's not the only one with a dark hole lurking in the back of his mind.





	nothing here but the mess

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosecake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecake/gifts).



> Written as a treat for Fandom Giftbox, for a prompt about Bodhi Rook: his background, who he was with the Empire and Galen, and interacting with Jyn. It ended up playing on the concept of memory and identity rather than being an actual backstory piece, but oh well!
> 
> (Hints of developing Bodhi/Jyn, as rosecake listed them as a potential pairing in her prompt list, but an actual romance scene didn't fit where this fic wanted to go. I've tagged it 'gen' because I don't want to be ... disingenuous? about what actually happens in the fic, but take it as they could've been if they'd had more time, if only, if only.)

Memories swirling, swilling, like blood mixing with the sand to make a slurry that time the stormtroopers shot the shopkeeper in Tythoni Square —

(was it a shopkeeper? or was it a priest, or a thief, or a deserter, or a bystander wearing the wrong jacket, or was it all those things at different times, mingled together to make one picture in several layers, like negatives or half-developed images on thin flimsiplast placed atop each other and blurred together with a wet paintbrush, he saw an art exhibition once, he thinks?)

(that makes no sense, this makes no sense, nothing _makes sense_ )

Bor Gullet is in his head, reaching, ripping through his mind, tearing and teasing, knocking the memories aside like shipping crates, yanking off the lids and letting the contents spill out on the floor in a giant mess while the ship pitches and yaws, banking to toss everything against the walls. He needs to sort it out but there’s no manifest, no way to tell what goes where, and he’s scrabbling on the floor trying to put it all back but it’s dark and the pieces slip through his fingers. But now it’s not shipping crates and cargo, now it’s grease and engine oil, and he tries to scoop it back into the container but he’s coated to the wrists and the stink fills his nostrils and it doesn’t matter, nothing matters, he’s lost and alone and Bor Gullet took everything, his name is somewhere but he can’t find it, where is it, who is he, _who_ —

“You’re the pilot.”

The voice, thick and gravelly but warm, somehow, cuts through the layer of panic. Bodhi wakes up gasping, sits up with a jolt, and at once he knows himself again. _Bodhi Rook_. _I’m the pilot_. “What?” he says anyway, stupidly. He blinks against the light, white and harsh, the headache drilling through his temples. He chases away the feeling of slick tentacles sliding across his skin.

The man snorts and leans back against the wall instead of repeating himself, letting his eyes fall shut. His friend, with the kind face and milky eyes, leans over and pats Bodhi on the knee. Bodhi reaches for their names but they slip away. He’s still learning. New memories don’t stick as well when he first scrambles out of sleep. The kind man smiles. “I sensed the conflict in your dreams, friend. Worry not, you have not lost yourself. The surface is agitated but the pool runs deep.”

“Don’t mind him,” says the big man, without looking up. “He always talks like that. He’s like an engine nobody can figure out how to turn off.”

It’s comforting in a way he doesn’t really understand, both the man’s voice and the soft edges to his smile, even the metaphor of the constant flow of words like the purr of a ship’s systems. People are hard but ships are easy. Even when the once-simple act of long-haul piloting became complicated ( _Can you say you played no part in this?_ Galen Erso said, the day he changed everything. _You_ know _what became of your cargo_ ), the ships themselves didn’t change. Bodhi could fix them, tinker in their innards and lose himself in the physical act of mechanical repair, and know that no matter how conflicted he might feel, he’d always know how to fix the ship.

“It’s all right,” Bodhi says. “I like engines.”

It feels like an inane thing to say, but no one laughs or scoffs at him. That in itself feels odd, like stepping on a floor tile that’s not quite aligned — a memory swims to the surface like a reluctant fish, his friends at the Academy laughing uproariously at his Jedha accent, at the way he tried to clip his consonants and round his vowels to sound more like Imperial Standard, how they all teased each other constantly, friendships built on a scaffold of friendly mockery — but warmth blossoms in his chest and that’s all right, maybe.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t want to sleep. Bor Gullet stalks him whenever his mind slips sideways, and Bodhi can’t let it catch him again so soon. He fears the dark, that terrible intimacy and the knowledge that nothing, no one, will ever know him so well ever again. But K2 has the helm for now and the course is laid in, and there’s nothing to fix and nothing to tinker with. He even nabbed an empty shuttle so there’s no cargo to sort and no manifest to read. Absolutely nothing to keep him occupied as they hurtle through hyperspace toward the secret rebel base and the exhaustion scrapes at him with jagged fingernails.

Worse, he can’t remember the last time he downed a cup of caf or popped a stim tab, and the headache in his temples has escalated to a full-scale construction crew pounding on the inside of his skull. But he already scoured the shuttle and came up with nothing but the most basic medical supplies, so on top of his mind skittering and trying to drag him into a quagmire of confused images and mutated mashed-up memories, now he has stim withdrawal to deal with.

Bodhi curls up in a corner of the shuttle and pulls his knees up to his chest. He’s dealt with exhaustion on long flights, that’s nothing new to a cargo pilot, but this — the helplessness and humiliation, the terror of being a prisoner in his own mind, afraid to close his eyes and rest even for a moment — this is beyond anything he ever trained for. He feels the burn in his eyes before the tears start sliding down his cheeks, and he hates himself for such weakness in a ship full of people who’ve seen a city burn, but there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

“Hey.”

Bodhi sucks in a wet breath, and it’s futile to wipe his eyes because that would only draw attention so he hopes the shadow of the bulkhead will hide him instead. This time his mind supplies the name easily: _Jyn Erso_ , daughter of Galen Erso, the man who pushed him, who prodded and poked and wormed his way into Bodhi’s head just like Bor Gullet and made him question everything he’d ever taken for granted because he saw something behind the anxious, exhausted cargo pilot who only wanted to do his job, get paid, and not think too hard or ask any questions.

He glances at her. She looks like Galen but softer, the same sharp cheekbones and delicate facial structure but with rounded features, instead of skin pulled taut over bone and sanded by grief and age. She has a fire in her eyes that had long burned out in Galen except in private, until the day he gripped Bodhi’s shoulder and forced him to reconsider everything he knew.

She’s pretty, too, piercing eyes and a strong jawline. Everything about her exists in a strange kind of tension, a push and pull between vulnerability and impenetrability, like walking toward a beautiful garden and slamming face-first into an invisible force-shield. She holds weapons like Cassian does, with a casual, almost thoughtless proficiency that says they’re part of her but an expression of quiet discomfort that says she wishes that they weren’t. Her hair has dried from the downpour, curling around her ears.

(Bodhi isn’t a — well, he was a _pilot_ , you don’t get to be a pilot in the Imperial Academy without, you know, and he knows he’s — let’s just say he’s had at least a dozen admiring individuals of various species along a sliding scale of inebriation tell him that he has very lovely eyes — but this isn’t, he’s not at his best right now, all right. That soak from the storm was the most he’d bathed since defecting, and that included the days in detention soaked in sweat and his own filth. Not that now’s the time or anything, but apparently even traumatized and fighting bone-gnawing fatigue Bodhi would much prefer he’d at least seen this side of a refresher and a bar of soap before she sits this close.)

Bodhi can’t help be drawn to her, the daughter whose memory kept Galen alive as his spirit crumbled, but he hasn’t forgotten the tense exchange she’d had with Cassian, both of them twisting daggers in the other’s ribs.

Jyn doesn’t look at him. She stares down at her hands, twisted in her lap, brows furrowed. Bodhi swallows, but he fights down the nervous urge to talk to fill the silence and lets her come to it herself. “I used to think of a hole,” she says. Bodhi blinks, and she sighs, softly, and rubs her forehead with the back of one hand. “When my mother died — when they took my father — I hid in a hole for days until Saw found me. I didn’t know he was coming, I just knew I was supposed to stay there, and so I did. After that, any time I had a bad feeling, or something I didn’t want to deal with, I’d just … put it in the hole. I’d imagine shutting it up there, where it couldn’t get me.”

After Saw, after Bor Gullet, after days of sitting in that cell and waiting to die while his mind slowly unravelled, a dark hole is the last place Bodhi would imagine when he wanted to feel safe. But to a child, alone and scared and hiding from the monsters, he can see how that might make sense. Jyn lets out a quiet laugh, almost a scoff, and twists the leather cord she wears around her neck between two fingers. “But now that hole’s been blown wide open. All those things I shoved away in the dark have all come back into the light, and I don’t know how to hide from them anymore.”

She finally turns toward him, and she doesn’t quite meet Bodhi’s eyes but it’s close enough. “I don’t know if anything I’m saying makes sense, except — I know what it’s like to feel like everything’s been ripped away, and for nothing to feel safe, even in your own head. But you’re here, aren’t you? You made a choice, and it made a difference. You did something, and now we’re going to fight, and that’s because of you.”

He’s not sure what makes him do it, but Bodhi reaches over and takes her hand. For a moment she stiffens, and he wonders if she’s going to pull away but then she squeezes back. Bodhi closes his eyes and lets himself focus on the contact, warm and solid and grounding, chasing away the last of the slithering touch of Bor Gullet lurking at the back of his mind.

“I’m the pilot,” Bodhi says to himself. Somewhere between Jedha and here it became his mantra, pulling him back when he starts to slip. “I’m the pilot.”

He risks a glance at her again. She doesn’t smile, exactly, but the corner of her mouth twitches a little and Bodhi feels that warm glow in his chest. He’s still terrified, still half convinced that at any moment some great mysterious evil force is going to march in and rip open the side of the shuttle and fling him into open space, but maybe she’s right. In the end he did make a choice. Now all that’s left is to see if he can make up for all those choices he pretended not to see before.

He still wears the Imperial insignia on his uniform. In another story, another Bodhi might take this moment to rip them off, ask for a knife in a grand gesture so he could ferret out the stitches and toss the patches aside, but — no. No, he chose this life, he chose to ignore the implications of his job for years so he could live a good, quiet, steady life while others starved and burned and staggered under the lash. The insignia is a part of him, just like his choices. He can’t pretend they’re not.

There’s no going back, Bodhi tells himself. He looks out the narrow window at the mottled grey blur of hyperspace. There is only forward.

“If you want to sleep, I can wake you if it looks like you’re having a nightmare,” Jyn says after a while, startling him. “I’m sure you could use the rest.”

He takes a deep breath and enjoys the feeling of clarity, of feeling grounded in himself and where he is for the first time in days, the rumble of the engines and the feel of the hull, firm and solid, beneath his boots. “I’m all right,” Bodhi says. “But thank you.” Sitting with Jyn is one thing, but the thought of her watching him sleep sends a shiver of — something, not unpleasant but not exactly safe, either — that he can’t identify and doesn’t have time to chase down.

Jyn nods, then lets go of his hand and pushes herself to her feet. “Chirrut, tell us a story?” she calls out, strolling over and dropping down onto the floor.

“Ah!” Chirrut exclaims with exaggerated delight. “I know many tales, my dear. What kind of story would serve you best?”

Bodhi closes his eyes again and lets the man’s voice wash over him as he spins a tale of a group of brave animals who journey across the desert to confront a terrible foe. He remembers the story from his childhood, though he suspects the creatures have been tweaked in favour of the listeners, and Bodhi loses the thread of the words and lets the cadence of Chirrut’s voice carry him to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> (do you think poor Bodhi ever got that shower)


End file.
